Kingsley eLearning Solutions

You have big dreams for your eLearning. We'll make them come true.

Future Proofing Course Links

UPDATE: See this solution if you have a lot of links. Future Proofing Multiple Course Links
We received a question over at eLearningEnhanced.com from a user, David, who is linking to government sites but the sites keep moving the content!
This comes up a lot... you create a link to your companies internal wiki "XYZ.com/wiki" but then they go and change it "XYZ.com/help". Now you have to go back and change all your courses and republish them.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could just update a central file to change all these links at once? Well, you can if you plan ahead. The trick is to point your links to your own HTML file which uses a bit of JavaScript to redirect the browser to URL you want. This HTML file could be stored with your course but it would be better if you could put it on the web server in a central location.
I will record a screenr to demostrate this also but here are the basic steps.
Lets say we want to direct folks to place to get some really cool Articulate widgets:
Create a basic HTML file

Save your file as widgets.html and place it on your server.
In your course create a link to yourserver.com/widgets.html
Now when the student clicks the link they will go to your HTML page that will automatically forward them to the site. It happens very fast so they wont know it.

But then later you realize it would be better to send them directly to the list of Articulate widgets rather then to the home page.
Just open up your widgets.html and change the link.